China: The Superpower of Mr. Xi
Roderick MacFarquhar
The New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015 Issue
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/08/13/china-superpower-mr-xi/
The Governance of China
by Xi Jinping
Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 515 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping: Renaissance, Reform, or
Retrogression?
by Willy Wo-Lap Lam
Routledge, 323 pp., $145.00; $50.95 (paper)
President Xi Jinping, Central Discipline Inspection Committee Secretary Wang
Qishan, and Premier Li Keqiang, Tiananamen Square, Beijing, September 2014
In the almost one-hundred-year existence of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), its current general secretary, Xi Jinping, is only the second leader
clearly chosen by his peers. The first was Mao Zedong. Both men beat out the
competition, and thus secured a legitimacy their predecessors lacked. 1 Why
was Xi chosen?
The Beijing rumor mill had long indicated that the outgoing elders were
looking for a "princeling" successor, that is the son of a senior first-
generation revolutionary. Princelings, it was apparently felt, had a bigger
stake in the revolution than most people, and thus would be the most
determined to preserve the rule of the CCP.
Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a respected vice-premier and member of the CCP
Central Committee known for his moderate views, but he fell afoul of Mao in
1962 and was purged, then was rehabilitated and returned to high office
after the Chairman’s death. Xi Jinping thus has the additional legitimation
of being "born red," as Evan Osnos put it recently in The New Yorker.
Doubtless this heritage partly accounts for Xi’s evident self-confidence,
but another factor could be the toughening he underwent as a young teenager,
fending for himself in the face of hostile Red Guards and thereafter working
in the countryside for six years. According to an official biography, "he
arrived at the village as a slightly lost teenager and left as a 22-year-old
man determined to do something for the people." Unlike his predecessors
Jiang Zemin, who had the benefit of studying in the Soviet bloc and then
rising through the relative stability of the industrial bureaucracy, and Hu
Jintao, who started in the industrial bureaucracy and then made his way up
the ranks of the Communist Youth League, Xi had no such protective carapace
in his early years. That background could explain why Xi has been taking far
greater risks after becoming general secretary than either Jiang or Hu did.
What is widely accepted among China hands is that Xi is the most powerful
leader of China since Deng Xiaoping, with a developing personality cult.
Xi is not primus inter pares like Jiang and Hu; he is simply primus. In his
recent book, Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping, Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a
veteran observer of Chinese elites, explains that since taking over as
general secretary in November 2012 and president of China in March 2013, Xi
has centralized power under his leadership to an extraordinary degree,
creating and chairing the new Central National Security Commission, which
has jurisdiction over the army, the police, and all foreign-related and
national security agencies, along with chairing the Central Military
Commission, which comes with his job as CCP general secretary. In a move
that surely undercuts the regime’s second-ranking member, Premier Li
Keqiang, supposedly the economic czar, Xi has created and taken the chair of
a new Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. Xi has
also taken on the leadership of central leading groups on foreign affairs,
Internet security, and information technology.
In fact, Xi is arguably even more powerful than Deng was, though Lam does
not suggest this. In promoting his reform program, Deng had to bob and weave
under pressure from equally senior colleagues who disliked reform. 2 The
only possible threat to Xi could have been his fellow princeling Bo Xilai,
but he had been conveniently purged by Hu Jintao in a lurid case that
involved his wife’s murder of a foreigner. 3 Xi’s current colleagues in the
Politburo and its Standing Committee (PSC), passed over for the top job,
seem less of a threat than the charismatic Bo might have been.
The Sisyphean task that Xi has set himself is to stamp out corruption in the
CCP. Both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao had warned about the dangers arising
from this pervasive problem. According to Hu, failure to eradicate
corruption could "deal a body blow to the Party and even lead to the
collapse of the Party and country." Xi has echoed Jiang and Hu, saying that
"upholding integrity and combating corruption are vital for the survival of
the Party and the state." On another occasion he emulated Mao by quoting
from an ancient philosopher: "Many worms will disintegrate wood, and a big
enough crack will lead to the collapse of a wall." But in contrast with the
efforts of Jiang and Hu to stem corruption, Xi has launched a very
high-profile campaign. In his words: "We should fight corruption with strong
determination,...persevere in our anti-corruption effort till we achieve
final success rather than start off full of sound and fury and then taper
off in a whimper." He may come to regret promising not to end with a
whimper.
Xi had been preaching the need to fight corruption long before he became
Party leader. At an anti-graft conference in 2004, he warned officials:
"Rein in your spouses, children, relatives, friends and staff, and vow not
to use power for personal gain." Xi knew of what he spoke. His sister and
her family were accumulating investments worth hundreds of millions of
dollars while he was rising up the ranks of the leadership, though Western
investigative reporters found no evidence that Xi’s immediate family was
involved in any way. Nor was this an isolated case among the top leadership.
Shortly before Wen Jiabao retired as premier in March 2013, it was reported,
by another Western news source, that his family, including his mother, wife,
children, and siblings, were rich to the tune of $2.7 billion. Such foreign
investigative reports require months of painstaking research, but within the
top ranks of the CCP, knowledge of the riches of other leaders’ families
must be easier to come by.
To deal with corruption, Xi has put Wang Qishan, a trusted, longtime
colleague, drawn from the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, in
charge of the Party’s Central Discipline Inspection Committee (CDIC). The
committee’s remit is to pursue both "tigers" and "flies," to root out
corruption at all levels. In 2014, Wang’s investigators’ work resulted in
over 71,000 officials being punished for violating the eight-point
anti-corruption rules. Many doubtless were guilty only of living high off
the hog on the public purse, not confining their banquets to "four dishes
and a soup," the traditional CCP measure of restraint. But dozens of senior
officials have been dismissed; in one province, the ranks of the Party have
been decimated from top to bottom. Perhaps the CDIC’s biggest achievement
last year was to repatriate five hundred fugitive officials from abroad and
recover almost $500 million of their ill-gotten gains. Wang hopes to
persuade even countries like the US, with which China has no extradition
treaty, to assist him in this endeavor.
The prime tiger to be bagged so far is Zhou Yongkang, a member of the ruling
Politburo Standing Committee until he had to retire for age reasons in 2012.
4 He had been in charge of the Central Political and Legal Affairs
Commission, supervising the security apparatus and law enforcement,
including the police, paramilitary forces, and domestic intelligence: not
the profile of one easily purged even in retirement. So before arresting
him, the CDIC cut the ground from under his feet by rounding up his
subordinates in the provincial and state organizations he had run. Last
month, Zhou was sentenced to life in prison, the most senior official to be
purged for corruption in the history of the People’s Republic.
Up till this point, there seemed to have been a comradely agreement that
former members of the Politburo Standing Committee were to be allowed to
retire in peace, so senior Chinese officials may hope that Zhou has really
been arrested for factional reasons rather than corruption, having been a
supporter of the purged Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping’s onetime rival princeling. In
that case, past and future ex-PSC members could breathe more easily. But if
Zhou turns out not to be the last tiger but the first, then existing
tensions in the top ranks of the Party will rise. Mao’s colleagues were too
afraid of him to unite against him even when they were falling like ninepins
in the Cultural Revolution: besides, to have brought down Mao--the Lenin and
Stalin of the revolution--would have deprived the CCP of its legitimacy. Xi
does not have that stature, so to continue his tiger hunt will require
nerve. 5
Like Mao before him, Xi relies on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as his
last line of defense. A year ago, eighteen leading active-service generals,
including the officers commanding central PLA departments and the seven
regional commanders, swore their loyalty to Xi as chairman of the CCP’s
Military Affairs Commission. But this demonstration that the PLA had his
back was a sign of weakness as well as strength. Mao had no need for so
public a demonstration of military loyalty. And since the anti-corruption
campaign has already targeted some senior generals, including a former
vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Commission and Politburo member--as
high as a soldier can get--these eighteen pledges may have been designed as
keep-out-of-jail cards. It remains to be seen how loyal the generals stay if
the campaign targets more top brass.
Swatting flies also involves considerable risks. In many ways, it is a more
important task than bagging tigers. Chinese citizens may cheer as another
tiger is laid low, but it is the flies, the lower-level cadres, whose
predatory activities affect their everyday lives. If corruption among the
well over 80 million Party members is as widespread as Chinese leaders imply
and the Chinese people believe, then tens of millions could be involved.
Suppose that only 10 percent of grassroots Party cadres are corrupt, almost
certainly a gross underestimate: that’s 8 million people. Then add in family
members, who the Wen Jiabao case suggests may well also be corrupt. With a
spouse, the figure becomes 16 million; add in a child, 24 million; add in a
sibling, 32 million; and with the sibling’s spouse, one has 40 million
people who should be prosecuted. And that’s with only a 10 percent
corruption rate. Party morale would crumble along with its organizational
strength, as it did during the Cultural Revolution. Already, compulsory
visits by officials to incarcerated colleagues must be intimidating.
Indeed, Xi is attempting a cultural revolution of his own. Whereas Mao
wanted to make Chinese leaders revolutionary, Xi wants to make them
righteous,
because moral purity is essential for Marxist parties to stay pure, and
moral integrity is a fundamental trait for officials to remain clean, honest
and upright.
In the 1980s, party officials jumped on Deng Xiaoping’s "to get rich is
glorious" bandwagon and many used their positions for corruption.
Under Mao, those officials had been told to "serve the people," but Mao had
betrayed them by making them the victims of Red Guard violence during the
Cultural Revolution. Corruption, beginning in the Deng era but far worse
now, was a payback for what they had endured. Now Xi wants to withdraw that
perk of Party membership. Will Party members fall into line or seek to
subvert the campaign? What will be the impact on potential Party members?
This problem is exacerbated by Xi’s lack of any persuasive ideology to
enthuse Party members. He has conjured up the "Chinese dream," the
"rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," and according to an official document
from the CCP’s Central Committee, "we are...rapidly arousing mass fervor,
proclaiming that socialism with Chinese characteristics and the Chinese
dream are the main theme of our age." 6 But the Chinese dream is too distant
to arouse "mass fervor" among citizens whose personal dream is to be able to
afford an urban apartment or their son getting a good job after college. As
for "socialism with Chinese characteristics," Deng Xiaoping’s justification
for putting Marxism on the shelf, any educated Chinese knows that the
nearest facsimile to that can be found only in Singapore. Taiwan could be
labeled democracy with Chinese characteristics. Capitalism with Chinese
characteristics? Hong Kong. And China? 1.3 billion people with Chinese
characteristics. There is no ideological there there.
Neither the "Chinese dream" nor "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has
the intellectual plausibility of Marxism-Leninism, and certainly does not
arouse the mass fervor of Mao Zedong Thought at its height. Marxism-
Leninism, like Confucianism, was a philosophy that embraced state and
society, that guided officials and prescribed rules for families. It was a
doctrine that glued cadres and people together. But however much Chinese
leaders proclaim that Marxism-Leninism is still their lodestar, and Xi
Jinping proposes the study of Marxism in institutions of higher learning, in
practice the works of Paul Samuelson and his successors are far more
relevant to officials who seek to engineer the Chinese dream than those of
Marx and Engels. Chinese who seek something to fill the spiritual void have
turned in their tens of millions to a different Western doctrine,
Christianity. The spread of a Western religion is a prime example of the
problems that face Xi in his avowed aim to keep out Western doctrines,
though the Party seems confident of containing it with a policy of knocking
off crosses and knocking down churches.
Without a substantive positive ideology to grip the Chinese people, Xi has
been forced to go negative, listing alien doctrines to be extirpated.
According to a central Party document, there are six "false ideological
trends, positions, and activities" emanating from the West that are
advocated by dissident Chinese: constitutional democracy; universal values;
civil society; economic neoliberalism; Western-style journalism, challenging
China’s principle that the media and the publishing system should be subject
to Party discipline; and promoting historical nihilism, trying to undermine
the history of the CCP by emphasizing the mistakes of the Maoist period. 7
There is nothing particularly surprising about this listing except for its
confirmation of the extent to which "opening up" has resulted in the spread
of Western values among Chinese citizens. But the sixth concern, "historical
nihilism," is a particular worry of Xi’s, connected with his understandable
obsession with preventing the CCP going the way of the Soviet Communist
Party. He believes the rot started in the Soviet Union when Party leader
Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s record in 1956, thereby dividing Soviet
history into a bad era (Stalin’s) and a good one (post-Stalin).
For Xi, it was historical nihilism to write off the Maoist period, with its
Great Leap famine and its Cultural Revolution--"the devastation that Mao
left in his wake," as Andrew Walder puts it in his major new book, China
Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed 8--as all bad, for he fears that would
ultimately mean denigrating Mao, and, as his portrait on Tiananmen
demonstrates, the Chairman is still the legitimator of the regime.
According to Xi, an important reason why the Soviet Union disintegrated and
the Soviet Communist Party collapsed was that "their ideals and convictions
wavered.... Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to
declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was
gone.... In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist." 9
Xi clearly intends that the members of the CCP should have their ideals and
convictions strengthened and he will be the "real man" who will lead the
resistance to infiltrating Western doctrines.
What Xi did not acknowledge was that when Gorbachev came to power in 1985,
his aim was to revive the Party and the country after two decades of
corruption and stagnation under Brezhnev. He believed in communism, state
ownership, and central planning, probably more deeply than Xi. Like Deng
Xiaoping, Gorbachev launched reform (perestroika) and opening up (glasnost).
But unlike in China, the Soviet bureaucracy had been in power for many
decades and had not been terrorized and undermined by a cultural revolution.
Resistance to perestroika was strong, even within the Politburo. Glasnost
became the more important route for changing the Soviet system, and authors
and journalists exploited their new freedom. Hitherto banned books were
published. Informal groups were set up in favor of perestroika. Public
opinion became important. The regime came under open attack. And gradually
Gorbachev became more radical in his effort to shock his countrymen into
change. Ultimately, the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved and the Soviet
Union fell apart.
Xi Jinping is as concerned as Gorbachev was to transform the Communist Party
that he leads and to prevent the collapse of the People’s Republic. The
Soviet example proves to him that glasnost is not the way to go. With an
estimated five hundred demonstrations a day across China, 60 percent of them
provoked by "land grabs" by local officials, opening the door further must
seem imprudent. 10 Rather, closing down has been the order of the day. The
atmosphere in intellectual circles has become chillier than under Hu Jintao.
Even anti-corruption whistle-blowers are punished; Xi wants a centrally
controlled campaign, not an unpredictable free-for-all.
So Xi has chosen his form of perestroika. In addition to the anti-corruption
campaign, it comprises thoroughgoing economic reform. But almost forty years
after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese bureaucrats have recovered
their self-confidence. Insofar as economic reform now will hurt their vested
interests, including their power over the economy, they drag their feet.
Local governments with no hope of increased central subsidies also are
recalcitrant.
How foot dragging can work was illustrated in an outburst by China’s premier
against ministers in April this year when he upbraided them for allowing
cabinet decisions to become mired among their subordinates. A further
factor, unmentioned by the premier, is probably a reluctance to take
initiatives because of the anti-corruption campaign.
If one compares this campaign to Gorbachev’s perestroika, the dangers to the
system become apparent. Gorbachev had to use weapons of the weak: volunteer
intellectuals from the ranks of journalists, editors, publishers, and
academia. Xi, on the other hand, is using a powerful, long-established
central party organization that can wreak havoc in any provincial or
ministerial organization it selects. In Mao’s Cultural Revolution, victims
were often chosen at random. Xi’s "cultural revolution" is anything but
random, and since a high proportion of Party cadres are allegedly corrupt,
they must all dread the arrival of a CDIC team in their area. In principle,
there is nothing to stop the investigators from criticizing, dismissing, or
indicting sufficient tigers and flies to paralyze the whole CCP. 11
Clearly Xi cannot want that. He has few options. He can gradually reduce the
tempo of the anti-corruption campaign, allow it to taper off, instruct Wang
Qishan to send out fewer investigation teams, and to pursue only the most
egregious sinners. Simultaneously he could tell the elite that they can keep
what they have, but from now on any new instance of corruption will be
punished severely. The tiger shoot would be over and the flies would go
unharmed. Xi would have to accept the humiliation of ending the campaign
with a "whimper."
This would hardly be a satisfactory outcome. Citizens would know that the
rich and powerful had got away with it again. They would characterize the
campaign as simply factional fighting at the top, as they will already have
noticed that Xi’s campaign has so far not targeted any princelings. And they
would continue to demonstrate against the flies. The "China dream" would be
dismissed as a joke.
Alternatively, Xi can pursue the campaign vigorously, if not to the bitter
end--which would never be reached--then at least for a few more years. The
dangers are clear: a coup against him by fearful tigers; demoralization
among the flies, the Party rank and file; the generals refusing to maintain
their support as they, too, continue to be besieged by the CDIC.
Or Xi could try to divert attention, either by stoking the fires of
nationalism with further provocative moves in the East and South China Seas
or by folding anti-corruption into a new campaign that would benefit both
the people and the country. This would be an attack on the third great
disaster that the CCP has visited upon the Chinese people, the degradation
of the environment, a tragedy whose impact will be longer lasting than the
famine or the Cultural Revolution. 12 Since the land grabbed from peasants
by officials is often sold to a polluting industry, corruption would still
be targeted. And if Xi took the chair of a new National Environmental
Protection Committee, finally a serious effort would be made to purify China’s
earth, air, and water.
Notes
1. Before Mao, leaders were effectively chosen by the Comintern’s agents in
China. On the Long March, the Comintern representative was sidelined and Mao
emerged as leader-to-be. Thereafter potential successors were chosen by Mao;
even Deng, despite being purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, was
effectively chosen by Mao, for it was he who was brought back to power by
the Chairman when Zhou Enlai was dying, an indication to all that Deng was
the only man with the ability to run the country. After Mao, Deng did the
picking. Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor, was Deng’s last pick.
2. Men like Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and Peng Zhen hankered after the command
economy and disciplined society that the CCP had put in place by the
mid-1950s, before Mao went off the rails in the calamitous Great Leap
Forward (1958--1960) and Cultural Revolution (1966--1976).
3. Bo Xilai, whose father had been senior to Xi’s, was thrown out of the
Politburo in 2012, partly because his outsize personality and his seemingly
neo-Maoist politics seemed threatening to collective leadership, and partly
in connection with the unsavory scandal of his wife allegedly murdering a
British citizen; see, for instance, Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang, A Death in
the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money and an Epic Power Struggle in China
(PublicAffairs, 2013). Bo was sentenced to life imprisonment in September
2013 for bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power.
4. To end lifetime tenure, Deng Xiaoping inaugurated the custom of officials
retiring so that they were not in office at age seventy.
5. In a discussion on rooting out corruption in the countryside in 1964, Mao
indicated his preference for catching the wolves first and then the foxes;
see Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought (1949-1968) (JPRS 61269, 1974), Vol.
2, p. 418.
6. See "Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere: A Notice
from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s General
Office," ChinaFile.com, November 8, 2013.
7. Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere." The document
has a seventh deadly sin, questioning reform and opening up, but this was an
attack on Chinese neo-Maoists.
8. Harvard University Press, 2015.
9. Chris Buckley, "Vows of Change in China Belie Private Warning," The New
York Times, Febrary, 14, 2013.
10. See Austin Ramzy, "Simmering Discontent," Time, June 7, 2012.
11. Sanctions and dismissal are the only punishments that the CDIC can
impose, but it can refer cases for indictment to the formal legal system
confident that requisite punishments will be meted out. Some Chinese think
the flies, at least, may be replaceable by bright, bushy-tailed young
graduates from top universities who will take over the localities. But
parachuting inexperienced officials into unfamiliar territory is hardly a
recipe for successful governance anywhere, least of all in a vast country
like China. When Xi went to the countryside at least he was able to go to
his father’s home province, and in the first instance he just worked as a
peasant.
12. Much has been written about pollution in China; see, for instance,
Elizabeth Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to
China’s Future (Cornell University Press, 2004) and Judith Shapiro, China’s
Environmental Challenges (Polity Press, 2012).
